Bryan Cranston Says the New ‘Power Rangers’ Movie Is Like ‘The Dark Knight’

In news to be filed under “Sure, okay,” Bryan Cranston has some interesting things to say about what we can expect from that new Power Rangers movie reboot — mostly that it’s “unrecognizable,” except not, and that it’s comparable to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, except also kind of not. But really, who’s to say?

Cranston is set to play Zordon, the giant talking head / mentor to the team of super-teens in Power Rangers, Lionsgate’s film reboot of the classic TV series. We’ve only seen a couple of official images from the film thus far, but they didn’t give us a whole lot to go on aside from shiny-but-still-colorful costume upgrades. We also know that Elizabeth Banks is playing the villainous Rita Repulsa, but that’s about it.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Cranston offered some insight into the tone and style of the reboot, emphasizing that it’s “different”:

I wasn’t really high on it until I talked to the producer and read the script and talked to the director. After that I went, ‘This is different.’ This is as different a reimagining as the Batman television series as it became the [The Dark Knight] movie series. You can’t compare those two, and nor can you compare this movie version of the Power Rangers to that television series. It’s unrecognizable for the most part. There are tenets of the folklore that you hold onto for sure, but the inspiration is different, and the sensibility of it, and the approach to the film making is completely different.

So it follows the Hollywood franchise / reboot mantra of “different, but, you know, the same” — which is to say that there are recognizable core elements but it’s going to be darker and grittier, and those aren’t exactly adjectives one would use to describe Power Rangers, of all things.

Cranston went on to explain that Power Rangers won’t be “as dark” as Nolan’s Bat trilogy, since it’s a movie about teenagers who don special suits to fight aliens and assimilate their super-powered robot vehicles into one giant mega-robot, but it will deal with typical teenage stuff like cliques and bullies and “hopes and dreams.”